By 1970 George Grant was recognized as one of Canada’s leading political philosophers. The previous year he had delivered the Massey Lectures, the country’s most prestigious lecture series, entitledTime as History, on CBC radio. In April 1970 he felt the need of a rest and he and his wife Sheila went on holiday to Barbados. While returning to their hotel after an evening out, the taxi in which they were riding collided head-on with an oncoming vehicle. Four people died in the accident; both Grant and Sheila were injured, in his case extremely seriously. His leg and right hand...

[In these talks I am going to discuss the conception of time as history. Next week I will try to enucleate what is being thought when time is conceived as history. What part does such a conception play in what we think ourselves to be? What is its relation to what we think worth doing? After that I will attempt to say something of how this conception came to be in the Western world.

That there is something unique about Western civilization seems to me indubitable when one remembers the fact that in the last three hundred years agents...

To start from the obvious: the word ‘tradition,’ in its present common sense usage, is much nearer to its origins, as an English word out of Latin, than is the word ‘revolution.’ It still means what is handed over, what is passed across. Indeed in earlier usage, the sense of ‘handed over’ could be used to express betrayal. A country was handed over to its enemies; it was betrayed; it was said to be traditioned. But now we use it simply in the sense of what is handed over or across the generations: what one generation knows about nature, or...

Individual life is always the loser in nature. Because human beings are self-conscious, the apprehension of this is a startling presence, even when the death concerned has been long expected and comes at the end of a natural span. But when death comes for the young – a child before his parents, a young man who has only begun the course – death appears unnatural and therefore more terrible. When the young death is that of a noble person (in origin the words noble and beautiful mean the same) then there is a deep revolt against the fact of death – against its...

I thought I would say a few remarks about the study of objectivity [to] those of you who are going into the practical life. My examples will be from history. Such examples come easily to my mind – because before I became a philosopher I studied history and still think very much as an historian. But what I am going to say applies equally to other studies.

Let me say what should not need to be said in any university and does not, I think, need to be said in a subject with traditions such as history, that intellectual integrity is...

The politics of technologized societies are an open field for demagogic tactics. Politics is the working out of public disagreement about purposes. But politics is now increasingly replaced by administration, as disagreement about purposes is legitimized away by the pervasive assumption that all which publicly matters is the achievement of technical ‘rationality.’ Elections become increasingly plebiscites in which the masses choose between leaders or teams who will be in charge of the administrative personnel. In plebiscites it is necessary to have leaders who can project their images through the various media, and so catch the interest of the masses who...

The first section, following, is an excerpt on the language of ‘values’ from pages 31–48 in the original. Pages 1–30 contain several draft ‘beginnings’ that do not add substantially to what is published elsewhere.

How then do we know what purposes we should use computers for and what not? The content of ‘should’ certainly does not come to us from ‘nature’ because in bringing the computer to be we have represented nature to ourselves as objective stuff which we master in our transcending of it; certainly not by the revelations of God because we have been taught that...

LAPIERRE: And Dr George Grant, author and professor of religion at McMaster University in Hamilton ...

GRANT: What happened, in my opinion, was that the biggest empire on earth decided about a little country right around the other side of the world from it, that it would smash it if it didn’t have the government that the Americans wanted. Now, this was a terrific lesson for Canadians because this wasn’t a crime done by people who were alien to us. This was a crime done by people who speak the same language, who share the same continent, under whose influence...

COOK: Well, George, you’re a philosopher and a professor of religion. But a great deal of your writing seems to me to deal with public affairs. Does that get you in trouble with your fellow philosophers?

GRANT: Well, you know, philosophers in the English-speaking world have been mainly interested in certain logical questions and not very interested in the public world. But I don’t think it

cook: Well, how do you explain your own ability to escape what you call ‘modern philosophy?’ That is to say, you are a kind of an outsider in terms of modern philosophy. Is it...

GZOWSKI: George Grant, author, Rhodes scholar, professor of religion, now at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, is also, I hope he will not be embarrassed to hear me say, something of, if not a cult figure, then a folk hero of sorts to many people. Principally, I would say, Professor Grant, because of your book,Lament for a Nation,dated 1965, which I had the pleasure of reading then and browsing through again last night, wondering how, if at all, your views had changed about the nation whose departure from this earth you were lamenting, in a way, in 1965. Have...

The classical way of asking ‘what is politics?’ was the unhistorical question ‘what is the political?’ What is that common quality which belongs to any event that we call political, the absence of which makes an event apolitical? Clearly if the word political means anything more than what happens, then some human events are not such. Modern common sense starts from the judgment that the political has to do with the activities of the state. But immediately a theoretical difficulty arises. If we are not totalitarians, we imply in so naming the political that there are some activities which transcend...

During this century Western civilization has speeded its world-wide influence through the universal acceptance of its technology. The very platitudinous nature of this statement may hide the novelty which is spoken in it. The word ‘technology’ is new, and its unique bringing together of techne and logos shows that what is common around the world is this novel interpenetration of the arts and sciences.11 As in all marriages, this new union of making and knowing has changed both parties, so that when we speak ‘technology’ we are speaking a new activity which Western Europeans brought into the world, and which...

Different civilizations and different periods within the same civilization have had differing paradigms of knowledge. The principle of each of these paradigms has been the relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective conditions for its realization. In our present civilization our paradigm is what we call ‘natural science.’ One does not have to be a physicist to know that physics has been the exemplary and most remarkable intellectual achievement of our era. Therefore it is appropriate in discussing ‘the frontiers and limitations of knowledge’ to start from a discussion of that paradigm. Indeed at a meeting of...

‘Beyond industrial growth’ can be interpreted¹ with the emphasis on any of the three words. Different issues will arise depending upon which word is emphasized. My task in this series is to emphasize ‘beyond.’² What will it be like to live on the further side of industrial growth? The other day when I had taken a foreign guest to Burlington³ she asked me on our return to Dundas:⁴ ‘Where is Toronto?’ I replied: ‘Toronto is on the further side of Burlington.’ (What it is to be beyond Burlington is of course quite beyond my imagination.)⁵

The thinker who first caught...

I think that on the whole, there is going to be less to go around in the North American economy, making it tougher to divide the pie than in the past. I regret it, but I think there is going to be an increase in class struggle. I am not a Marxist and I regret that tougher actions will result from the divisions in the economy. When there are tough actions, the weak suffer.

I think that more and more people live within the orbit of some great corporation which protects them. These corporations can be business, trade unions, government...

suffers, yields

What do I mean by obedience

what was its relation to the old view of

what is good

what does obedience mean to the new

– The classic case of obedience is X.¹

the lamb led to the slaughter – suffers, Yields

X. commands by beseeching

One way of looking at obedience

is to ask the question backwards

why does the ancient view of good

include the idea of obedience

(therefore) write down what was said about good

Good was what we were suited for

As animals we were suited for life,

pleasant life, procreating life

As thinking we...

Did Nietzsche ever write about comedy? Perhaps this is what is most wrong about him and perhaps about Heidegger. There is a romantic egocentricity about Nietzsche and Heidegger that I find hard to stomach.

If one sees that historicism is true but that it is deadly to the soul – then one way of opting out of the deadliness of the situation is to go in for myth-making (are they delusions?) as a way of escaping from the natural [or perhaps actual?]. There is something like might in all history.Hysteron-proteronis when you put first things last – and last things...

This book gives a powerful account of what has been going on politically and economically in Canada during the last decades, and particularly under the Trudeau administration since 1968.² It is opportune that the book should appear at this time because it describes coherently the complex relation between the political crisis caused by the establishment of the PQ government in Quebec City, and the degeneration in the fabric of our country by our growing dependence on American imperial capitalism.³ The relation between these two central themes of our history has never been easy to understand. Its complexity is illustrated in...

Canadian politics has had two main questions: (i) how to maintain some independence while sharing this continent with the most powerful modern empire; and (ii) how to maintain workable relations between the French and English-speaking communities. Those two very complex questions can only be thought about clearly if they are thought about together.

This country was made up of two founding groups who weren’t very friendly to each other, but who made a contract because they thought such a contract would help each of them achieve their own particular ends – but they were different purposes.

The present constitutional crisis has...

The subject matter of this book is of central significance for those who study political philosophy. Socrates is the primal figure for that uniquely Western activity. More than any other modern thinker, Nietzsche placed Socrates at the centre of Western history as the creator of rationalism, and claimed in his own thought to have overcome that rationalism. Therefore, in Nietzsche’s view of Socrates we are near the centre of thinking about the nature of political philosophy. For somebody from outside the US (such as myself) it is a happiness to find that a professor of government at Cornell should devote...

QUESTION: Let’s look back atLament for a Nationeleven years later. First, do you still think that Canada’s disappearance as a nation is a matter of necessity? Do you think that nationalism has a future as far as Canada is concerned?

GRANT: Obviously no sane person predicts the details of the future. It is quite clear that the central ruling class of the great corporations, national or multi-national, do not think in terms of Canadian independence. Beyond that I find it very hard to believe that the general English-speaking bourgeois want anything particularly distinctive to be built on the...

‘Faith and the multiversity’ is a subject which could be tackled from many angles, both practical and theoretical.

The essence of the question is, however, the relation between faith and modern science.¹¹You may well say – not that terrible old chestnut once again! Hasn’t there been so much discussion of this over the last centuries that there is nothing worthwhile left to be said about it? My answer is no. The relation between modern science and faith lies at the core of the relation between faith and the multiversity; and thought has not yet reached that core. Many Christians turn...

Why did so many Canadians love John Diefenbaker? Watching his funeral on television, I had to ask myself why I should feel such affection for him, such a sense of debt for what he represented.

The trust of his countrymen had enabled him to break the long smooth reign of the Liberals from 1935–57, and had been the basis of the enormous electoral victory of 1958. But this love was even more marked in the elections of 1963 and 1965. In those elections he had the full weight of the powerful classes against him (including its members in his...

Canada tottered through the 1970s with the same political problems that have occupied us from our beginnings. When René Lévesque won a large electoral victory, the fact that we are two cultures (call it, if you will, nations) within one state was at last forced even into the bland consciousness of English-speaking Canadians.¹

The divisions of economic interest between the various regions of the country, which had always been recognized by people out West and in the Maritimes, were made unavoidably clear to the people of Ontario by the need for oil. The third and fundamental of our contradictions, as...

Mr Chancellor, Mr President, fellow graduands, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for this honour.

Love demands that I begin by paying tribute to a great member of the University of Toronto whom many of you did not know because he died in his tenth decade this year. Burgon Bickersteth was Warden of Hart House in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.¹ He was one of the many people who made this a great university. He lived the necessary union of love and knowledge – what is expressed in the phrase, ‘then shall I know, even as also I am known.’² I do...

Most of us try to act from what we know or think we know. Therefore, if we are to understand society, we must understand our educational institutions.

In the Sixties a great change took place in the universities of Ontario. They were expanded in numbers, size, and wealth by the Government. Like most things in Ontario, this change was initiated because of what was happening in the United States. This change should be associated with the name of President John F. Kennedy.¹

The question was asked in terms of Sputnik: Can it be possible that US education has fallen behind...

When I began this preface, its title was going to be ‘Why did George Grant write about Céline?’ However, I found myself repeating the answer he himself had given. It seemed more useful, therefore, just to say why I thought it worthwhile to piece together Grant’s notes for his unpublished and unfinished book on Céline, and present them here as an imperfect whole.

The condition of Grant’s notes on Céline was extraordinary. There were often groups of consecutive typed passages, most of them quite long, one passage having six different versions. Numerous handwritten pages were included, some being the origin...

English-speaking people may find it difficult to recognize that Martin Heidegger, the leading philosopher of this Western era, and Louis Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961), its greatest literary artist, were both acquiescent (at the least) towards the National Socialist regime in Germany. I do not make this claim for Céline because of his two famous novels of the 1930s,Voyage to the End of the NightandDeath on the Instalment Plan, but because of his three books about his wanderings around Germany during its collapse in 1944–45,Castle to Castle,North, andRigadoon.ª The first purpose of this article...

The Western figure of justice holds in her hand the balance. The weighing machine stood as the guarantee of a just sale. It also stood for a balanced and fair relation between crimes and their punishment. Above all it stood for the fact that justice required the maintenance of equilibrium in society. Equilibrium meant literally an equal balancing of discordant forces, a balance between individual passions and public order, between private economic powers and the needs of the majority, etc. etc. Balance has been considered in Western history the very core of justice and therefore to write of balance in...

In 1978 more than 62,000 Canadian women had their children killed before they could be born. An increase in these numbers takes place every year, so that by the end of 1981 we may nearly have reached the 100,000 level. The percentages are similar in Western Europe. They are greater in the Soviet Union. Obviously, one cannot be against abortion when the woman’s life is at stake, but that situation is now exceedingly rare. The present mass foeticide takes place almost always for convenience. The medical professionals tell us that 95% of abortions are now done to kill the healthy...

Grant delivered this talk in the summer of 1981 to a session of the Canadian Political Science Association held in honour of his friend and colleague James (Jim) Aitchison.¹ He prefaced his talk with these words:

It is a great honour to take part in a meeting to praise J.H. Aitchison. He is a man who combines integrity and judgment – judgment being the ability to bring together properly the particular and the universal. If I had to use one word to describe Aitchison, I would use the Greek wordphronesis. It is a word for which there is no exact...

It is surprising for modern readers to find that a fifth of Aristotle’s great book on ethics is devoted to friendship. I intend to write of Dennis Lee as friend because friendship is a form of love and love illuminates the intellect. In that illumination we come to know things about other people. The Platonic affirmation that our intelligences are illuminated by love has been darkened in our era both because our chief paradigm of knowledge concerns objects, that is, things held away from us so that we can master them, and also because the pre-eminence we give to sexuality...

It is both an honour and a pleasure to write a foreword to Dr Bithika Mukerji’s book. But it is more than that, because the central issue which is always present in this book is of such great importance for all thoughtful human beings, whether they be from the East or the West. What is the relation between modernity (call it if you will ‘technology’) and the great truths of the religious and philosophical traditions from before the age of progress? Dr Mukerji looks at this issue in terms of India, but it is clearly of equal importance in Europe,...

Christ said: Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice.¹ Socrates said that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it.² It is not my purpose here to discuss the relation between these two statements. That would be to raise the question which in Jewish terms is the relation between Athens and Jerusalem, and in Christian terms the relation between Socrates and Christ. I will simply abstract from discussing whatever possible differences have been said to distinguish these two statements and take them as saying something common about justice. Nor is it my purpose to discuss...

On Canada: Canada is a nation put together of regions. I think that is what this nation is all about. In terms of immediate politics, there has been an attempt by the government to reconcile French-English differences, but no real concern about our independence as a nation ... It’s quite a destiny to live next door to the greatest empire in the world. As a result, it’s hard to maintain our individuality. (The situation) is bound to make people the same.

On the Charter of Rights: I believe that rights must be written down, but I don’t want to be...

Professionalism is the name of the game in technological societies – whether they be capitalist or communist. There are small differences between capitalism and communism but that is not my business here – which is to speak of professionalism as it is in the corporation capitalism society of North America. Before saying why professionalism is the name of the game for us, it is necessary to say what is meant by technological society.

Most of us represent technology to ourselves as the great step forward that human beings made in the invention of instruments for human use. Human beings have since their...

Carl Berger’sScience, God, and Nature in Victorian Canadais yet another interesting book in his excellent series about Canadian intellectual history.¹ In the first half Berger writes of the Canadian essays in ‘natural history’ in which ladies and gentlemen went around cataloguing the facts about rocks and flowers and animals in the new country. This was a Canadian manifestation of the spirit of Linnaeus: the new interest in science was expressed in wanting to know the details of the natural world rather than in putting nature to the question. Linnaeus–the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist–was a modern man chronologically,...

It may seem strange that I pay tribute to a friend (to whom my debt is great) by making some comments about a commentary. But the very nature of the debt is expressed in these comments. Professor Doull has never reduced his study of the past to antiquarianism. Although a remarkable and careful student of the past, he has always known that philosophy is an activity practised now, and that its end is far higher than that of scholarship. The present commentary being discussed here is masterfully achieved at the level of scholarship, but is far more than that. It...

GRAIL: Many people in Canada know of your ideas from having taken a first year political science course in whichLament for a Nationwas discussed. It is now twenty years later, and, if you were lamenting the defeat of Canadian nationalism then, you probably have more to lament today. Could you briefly talk about Canadian nationalism in the 1980s?

GRANT: Let me say first that this is an area where I come from a very different tradition. Traditions are minor in the history of the world, but I come from a different tradition. For example, one of the hardest...

Technology and Justicebrings together six essays that Grant describes in his preface as unified by their exploration in different ways of what it means to live in a civilization shaped by technological science, a science determined by ‘the conquest of human and non-human nature’ (588). The two longest essays, ‘Thinking About Technology’ and ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ underwent a number of revisions; earlier versions of both can be found in this volume of theCollected Works.¹ ‘Thinking About Technology’ was presented as a paper at the 17th World Congress of Philosophy held in Montreal in 1983, under the title...

This book comprises statements by forty-seven thoughtful Canadians who oppose the Canada-US free-trade agreement. The contributors vary widely: from Margaret Atwood to Frank Stronach, from David Suzuki to Peter C. Newman.² It is divided into three sections: ‘What We Think,’ ‘What We Know,’ ‘What We Feel.’ Most of the contributors are people who believe that free beings ought to be able to decide rationally what will happen in the world. That is, the good-mannered and liberal left predominates. Different voices deal with different problems: many with the economic issues, some with the social, cultural, and political issues. Taken all in...

There are new and threatening developments in our society about which the Anglican Church of Canada has, as far as we know, spoken very little.^aHuman life, as we know it, is faced with changes which may be summed up under the word bio-technology , or the engineering of the life process. We can now make human life in the laboratory; we can synthesize, split, and change living substances at will; monkeys’ brains are being transplanted; cattle and sheep have been cloned; scientists in the USA are engaged in a three-billion-dollar project, working out the full chemical data base of...

The decision of the Supreme Court concerning abortion could be seen as comedy if it did not concern the slaughter of the young. Any laughter is quelled by a sense of desolation for our country. Yet the comedy too must be looked at to understand our political institutions. The comedy arises from the fact that the majority of the judges used the language of North American liberalism to say ‘yes’ to the very core of fascist thought – the triumph of the will. Their decision is a good example of Huey Long’s wise dictum: ‘When fascism comes to America it will...

Grant was not able to vet this transcript of his conversation with William Christian because he died while it was being prepared.¹ William Christian published it in volume 26, no. 1, of theJournal of Canadian Studies, Spring 1991: 42– 63, with the following preface:

These interviews with George Grant were supported bySaturday Night Magazineand encouraged by its editor, John Fraser. What follows is not a complete record of the recorded conversation we had over those two days. Those familiar with him know that his conversation was like a spaniel exploring a field, setting off in one direction,...

This section of theCollected Worksbrings together Grant’s unpublished and published writings on the French philosopher, mystic, and social critic Simone Weil, his greatest Christian teacher. Weil was born into a prosperous secularized Jewish family in Paris on 3 February 1909. Her father was a medical doctor who served in the French army during the First World War. Her mother, an accomplished musician from an aristocratic Russian family, personally directed the exceptional childhood education of Simone and her older brother André (1906–94), who became one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. Simone attended the Lycée Henri...